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It's the kind of find that every art dealer dreams of: pictures considered so inconsequential that they are sold cheap in bundles of four or five - which later turn out to be the lost works of a master.

In February 1956, Henry Roland, of the Mayfair gallery Roland, Browse and Delbanco, stumbled on just such a trove.

He made his discovery while at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris for the sale of a collection including prints by Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Munch, Modigliani and Renoir. Examining these, he spotted nearby a handful of paintings by the collection's late owner, also an artist, which Drouot had hung in the hope of enticing buyers to the "atelier sale" (of the studio contents) the following day. The labels on the pictures gave only their lot number, but Roland was spellbound.

"I was overwhelmed by their beauty," he wrote of that moment, in a 1991 memoir published shortly before his death. "They were the most marvellous fauve pictures, painted well before the fauves themselves... they were absolutely wonderful."

The following day, Roland bought 60 of the pictures (the surrealist André Breton was among the other buyers), and took them back to London, where he exhibited them in his gallery. So began the process of reacquainting the world with the genius of Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940).

It would be another 30 years before O'Conor had his first museum retrospective (at the Barbican, in 1985), and a further seven for the scattered fragments of his life to be pieced together for a biography. Yet after that brief moment in the sun, O'Conor then shrank back to being no more than a footnote in the story of modern art.

Bretonne (1903)Credit:
National gallery of Ireland

Certainly only a minuscule proportion of his work has ever been on public view. At the Royal Academy's post-impressionism show in 1979, for instance, he was represented by only three works.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland will change that. Roderic O'Conor and the Moderns presents around 43 of O'Conor's works alongside those by such better-known contemporaries as Gauguin and van Gogh, who were also his very good friends.

Indeed, so popular was O'Conor among the avant garde that when the Bloomsbury Group members Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell visited Paris in the Twenties, they would always make a beeline for O'Conor's studio in Montparnasse. Bell's husband, Clive, described the Irishman as "the most formidable figure in the quarter". To the British artist Matthew Smith, he was simply "mon maître".

Yet despite his daunting reputation, O'Conor - heir to an 1,800-acre estate in Ireland, with a substantial private income - was also extremely generous towards less fortunate artists. "He helped many of the younger generation, including Modigliani," says Jonathan Benington, curator of the Dublin show.

"Maybe they needed a coffee, or a meal. Maybe they needed to sell a work." In his later years, in honour of such kindnesses, he became known as "Père O'Conor".

Roderic O'Conor was born in Castleplunket, County Roscommon, in 1860, and educated at Ampleforth. When he announced his intention to become a painter, his family was horrified. Undeterred, he enrolled himself at art college, first in Dublin, then Antwerp.

By 1886, he was in Paris, when the city was fizzing with post-impressionism. He trained under the same teacher as John Singer Sargent and, by 1889, had already had several paintings accepted by the Salon.

Coastal Landscape (1893)

The new exhibition, though, focuses on the pictures O'Conor made when he was working alongside Gauguin and others at Pont-Aven, Brittany, between 1887 and 1895, a period which Benington believes to be the Irish artist's peak.

"At that moment, they were absolutely at the forefront of the avant garde, producing such daring work, pushing against every boundary."

Pont-Aven, a remote village between wooded hills and a sweep of beaches, had become a magnet for artists in search of landscapes untouched by urbanisation. Fascinated by the locals, the artists would routinely paint them in traditional costume.

"The villagers, from long practice, were excellent models, and posed anywhere and everywhere," one visitor wrote. Paul Signac, who arrived in the same year as O'Conor, described Pont-Aven as "a strange cradle... Everywhere painters in velvet garments, drunk and bawdy."

Of particular note among the works O'Conor made here are his sketches, in which dynamic cross-hatching draws out form through the interplay of light and dark. It was here, too, that he began to lengthen and striate his brushstrokes into bands of colour. Inspired by Gauguin's exhortation to avoid copying nature too closely, his palette becomes warm and intense: electric blues, reds, pinks, oranges and greens, the colours laid thickly with a brush and knife.

Still Life with Apples and Breton pots (1896-1897)

Gauguin was a particular friend. The two artists often painted side by side; one of Gauguin's drawings includes some of O'Conor's self-portraits in its background. Both had a way with women (and many mistresses).

In 1920, when the fauve artist André Derain was introduced to O'Conor, he commented that he had never met anyone who reminded him so much of Gauguin. In 1894, O'Conor even lent Gauguin his studio when the Frenchman was broke and recovering from a broken ankle sustained in a drunken brawl with some fishermen involving a monkey.

After Gauguin's death in 1903, O'Conor stopped going to Brittany, and settled in Paris. Having always been suspicious of dealers, he turned down the chance to be represented by Ambroise Vollard (who would provide invaluable exposure for artists such as Cezanne, van Gogh, Degas, Picasso and Matisse) - a decision that goes some way to explaining why his reputation later suffered.

In 1933, when O'Conor was 73, he married one of his models, Renée Honta. They settled in the Loire, in a grand, turreted house formerly owned by the village's chief winegrower.

O'Conor continued to paint until his death in 1940, when Renée shut up the house and fled to Switzerland - only weeks before the village was occupied by German forces. After her death, in 1955, O'Conor's paintings were sold by his nephews and nieces, at the Hôtel Drouot.

No provision had been made in the will for the rest of the household goods, and so O'Conor's housekeeper sold most things to a passing brocanteur.

But not everything. In the early Nineties, when Benington was researching his biography of O'Conor, he was shown around the house and studio by his former housekeeper, now in her 90s.

"She had kept one or two bits of his crockery and bedding," says Benington, "little remnants that weren't worth anything, but she was terribly proud of them. Then just as we were leaving she pulled out a family photo of Roderic and his siblings, taken when he was about eight years old. It was cracked and discoloured, but she'd clung on to it for half a century."

Roderic O'Conor and the Moderns is at the National Gallery of Ireland, July 18 to Oct 28; nationalgallery.ie